Technology is available to virtualize the primary computing resources - servers, storage and networks, and these technologies are enjoying increasing adoption by end users. Extensive research is underway to enable effective management of deployments based on virtual technologies. We are looking for papers that highlight management of workloads deployed based on virtual technologies.

The increasingly popular deployment of virtualization for servers, storage and networks has created an explosion in virtual servers, storage and network deployments in modern data centers. This is a constant challenge for organizations' IT departments. At the same time, businesses are demanding increased cost effectiveness of their IT assets, asking for increasing resource utilization without compromising service levels. We are interested in papers that highlight ways to automate the management of virtual deployments thus reducing staffing requirements, and optimize the utilization of available resources.

Older applications are often the mainstay of IT businesses - they sustain the business. Yet these applications are increasingly being called upon to meet updated requirements, to interface in new ways with the latest technologies, and to accommodate new deployment technologies such as virtualized data centers and cloud-based delivery. We are interested in papers that highlight ways to cost effectively modernize older applications without the need to replace them with newer alternative implementations.

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular in today’s IT environments. Yet, not all application deployments are well suited to the cloud offerings available. We are interested in papers that explore technologies for determining which applications/workloads are most amenable to cloud deployment, and which are capable of taking advantage of the unique cloud capabilities on a massive scale in multi-tenant operations.

Many IT organizations are looking to utilize cloud-based services to satisfy some fraction of their computing requirements. Yet, most cloud deployments result in provider lock-in. That is, once a workload or application is deployed to a specific cloud offering, it is difficult or impossible to move that workload, either within a single vendor’s cloud offering, or from one vendor's cloud to another. We are looking for papers that highlight ways to facilitate the moving of workloads from one cloud to another, and for ways in which the movement can be automated.

The increasing attractiveness of cloud computing is creating challenges for IT organizations that wish to optimize the utilization of the cloud resources used by their applications/workloads, in order to minimize the cost of cloud resources necessary. Similarly, cloud providers are looking to maximize the utilization of the cloud resources being provided to cloud customers, in the face of increasingly complex and dynamic workloads. We are interested in papers that highlight technologies for optimizing the way applications/workloads utilize cloud resources, and for ways in which cloud providers can maximize cloud resource utilization without compromising Service Level Agreements. We are especially interested in technologies that can automate either form of optimization.

For the cloud to truly become the new IT paradigm, it will not be enough to simply move the existing applications into the cloud environment. Inevitably, some new applications will need to be developed, or existing applications will need to be re-developed to fit the cloud, rather than the traditional data centre. We would like to see submissions that address questions of what would be the best products, languages, tools, and techniques for developing new Cloud-based applications, or refactoring existing applications into true cloud-based applications, and why they would be different from (or the same as) traditional application development.

One of top concerns expressed by IT professionals in recent surveys regarding their reluctance to move business critical applications into a cloud environment was security. What are the security issues and solutions involved that can protect corporate data and address attacks from outside, such as from viruses and Trojans, or Denial of Service attacks? Are these issues different for cloud providers from those experienced by traditional outsourcing scenarios? Are there new threats on the horizon that might specifically target a cloud provider? How would you prevent them?